British botanist, physiologist and ecologist from Edmonton in London who trained at the University of London (BSc, 1935, PhD, 1941). His thesis on plant physiology was entitled Studies in the Assimilation of the Tomato Plant: The Distribution of the Assimilated Material among the Various Plant Organs. He later received a DSc from the University of Melbourne (1953) and an honorary DSc from the University of Trieste (1990).

After graduating in London, David Goodall was employed as a research assistant at the Research Institute of Plant Physiology at the East Malling Research Station in Kent, and was later promoted to Scientific Officer. From 1946-1947 he was based in Africa as a plant physiologist at the West African Cacao Research Institute, Tafo in Ghana. The following year he emigrated to Australia and was appointed Senior Lecturer in Botany at the University of Melbourne (1948-1952). From 1952 to 1954 he returned to Ghana where he was Senior Lecturer, then Reader in Botany at the University College of the Gold Coast in Achimota. For the next two years he was Professor of Agricultural Botany at the University of Reading (1954-1956), the last academic position he held in Britain.

David Goodall was appointed to the first of a number of senior positions in Australia with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), as Director of the Tobacco Research Institute in Mareeba, Queensland (1956-1961). He was later Senior Principal Research Scientist at the CSIRO Division of Plant Science (1956-1961) and Senior Principal Research Scientist at the CSIRO Division of Mathematical Statistics in Perth (1961-1967). He also held an honorary position as Reader in Botany at the University of Western Australia (1965-1967). Moving on to the United States, he was briefly Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California (1967-1968) and subsequently Professor of Systems Ecology (1968-1974) at the Ecology Centre of Utah State University.

Returning finally to Australia, he accepted a position as Senior Principal Research Scientist at the CSIRO Division of Land Resources Management in Canberra, Deniliquin and Perth (1974-1979) also holding a position as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Swedish Coniferous Forest Project (1974-1978). He formally retired in 1979 but held honorary positions as Research Fellow (1979-1998) at the CSIRO Division of Land Resources Management (then the Division of Wildlife and Ecology) and from 1998 as Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Ecosystem Management at Edith Cowan University. He also became Editor-in-Chief for the series Ecosystems of the World.